EDITORIAL: Assault rifles, background checks and the Second Amendment

The March 20 front page of the Daily News after U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, R-Nev., said a federal gun-control bill would not contain a ban on assault rifles. The children pictured were the victims of the Newtown, Conn., shooting in December.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

That would be, in its entirety, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a puzzling sentence, both syntactically and historically. Books, with wildly different conclusions, have been written about its meaning.

As has been trenchantly observed, however, the Constitution, about which Americans argue constantly, is what the members of the Supreme Court of the United States says it is. Recently, some of what they have said is this:

o The amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm and to use it for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

o That part about the "well regulated militia"? It doesn't limit the right to bear arms, it only upholds the right.

o The intent of the amendment is to guarantee a counterweight to potential government tyranny.

o The right to arms is not unlimited and can be regulated within the right recognized and intent of the amendment.

The question, then, is how do we protect both lives and right within that right and intent, and those limitations?

The truth is that assault weapons are not and will not be for the foreseeable future central to making progress against gun violence in the United States.

While the federal government and states may well be within their powers to prohibit assault rifles, the reality is that your average hunting rifle has roughly the same killing potential.

(We say this while recognizing that assault rifles are specifically adapted to the business of doing a lot of killing quickly, often at close quarters, and that's why soldiers and police tactical teams carry assault rifles, not semiautomatics with which one might hunt deer, for instance.)

It is misguided to get hung up about what kind of mass killing weapon will be used in the next massacre. A strongly motivated individual will find a way with any semiautomatic rifle, which will never be altogether prohibited under constitutional interpretation of the Supreme Court.

Then, there is the reality that the vast majority of firearms violence in America is inflicted with handguns.

The foremost opportunity to reduce gun violence in America today, then, is to limit access by making background checks a universal requirement.

Under current requirements, many firearms sold in the United States are not subject to background checks, since only federally licensed dealers are subject to the requirement. Private transactions at gun shows and sales among neighbors or through Craigslist, for instance, are exempt.

In the first 13 years of operation, federal background checks, even despite the exemptions, blocked 1.6 million firearms sales, half of which would have gone to felons.

Because background checks are effective, there should be no exemptions.